“What are you doing?” I clutched the toilet paper in my fist and buried it under the duvet before he could see it. He couldn’t know. He would want to take me to the ER, and I hated ERs. Emergency rooms were where your soul went to die so that your body would keep functioning.

“No point in getting undressed when we leave in an hour,” he murmured into my ear, pressing his hard-on to my ass. He sounded too sleepy for sex. Surprisingly, I wasn’t disappointed. I felt like hell, and sex with Dean wasn’t something you could wing or half-do.

“How was the meeting?” I rasped.

There was a pause before he answered. “Good.”

“Is Trent moving to Todos Santos?”

“Eventually. And in time, so will we.”

“Excuse me?”

“Priorities, Rosie. They change. We’re changing, too.”

“You sound like them,” I accused, though I wasn’t as mad at Dean as I was at my parents.

“No.” He clasped my chin between his fingers and turned my head for a soft, slow kiss. The kind of kiss you give your wife on your wedding day, not to the girl next door you occasionally screw. “I sound like me. And I don’t give a fuck about what they want. But I know that you’re in New York for the wrong reasons. You can have your independence here, too. The only power people have over you is the amount you give them.”

I swallowed, changing the subject. “Did you stop at your dad’s?”

“Didn’t have time. Dropped Trent off ten minutes ago at his parents’ house. He’ll have to wait. Why are you awake?”

“I had a lot to process today.” Not a lie. That seemed to appease him. I stifled the rest of my coughs to avoid producing more blood. When we finally got to the airport, I locked myself in a restroom.

And coughed. And coughed. And coughed.

When I landed back in New York and called Dr. Hasting, her receptionist said she had a family emergency and was out of town. She urged me to go to the hospital for a checkup.

I should have done that, but I wanted to push reality’s boundaries just a tad more, thinking what could possibly go wrong?

The answer was everything.

Everything could go wrong.

SETTING UP A PHONE CALL with Nina felt like willingly taking the steps to death row and urging the guards to keep up with my pace.

She was so surprised to see my name on her screen, she spent the first two minutes of the conversation stumbling on her words. I wanted to get shit done and meet him. Get it over and move on with my life. My dad was begging for me to talk to him about the Nina stuff, but I was screening his calls in an attempt to keep the drama level in my life relatively low. If it weren’t for Rosie making me promise her I’d do it, I’d have probably never made the call. Opening this Pandora box was not the kind of shit I’d looked forward to. But hey, I made a promise.

The first thing I did after our trip to Todos Santos was rent a place in the Hamptons for Rosie and me for the whole next week. Proposing wasn’t in the cards—too much too soon—but I sure as fuck was going to tell her it was time for her to save those one hundred bucks and move her stuff up to the penthouse. It made sense. For the past two months we’d been pretty much living together. But she still had to go down every night to bring a hair straightener, or a clean shirt, or a goddamn hairband. It got to the point where I couldn’t even look at her floor number in the elevator without feeling my eyelid tick with barely-contained frustration. Speeding shit up was high on my list of priorities.

To be honest, I was more or less done with New York at this point. The only thing I really wanted from here—Rosie—was beginning to look a lot like mine, and moving her back to SoCal was going to earn me some serious brownie points in the eyes of Paul and Charlene LeBlanc.

Besides, Vicious was right. The weather here was shit, the air too polluted, and as much as I enjoyed playing a hotshot New York businessman, I enjoyed having a fucking tan, a cold beer, and a yacht on standby even more.

Trying to kill the newly found bounce to my step, I pinned the idea of moving back to Cali as I waltzed into The Black Hole to surprise my girlfriend with lunch. I had a business thing with three investors, but decided to cancel at the last minute to tell her about the Hamptons. It was pissing rain that day, so the café was mostly empty. There was no one behind the counter and only a few people scattered at some tables, staring at their digital screens. I rapped my knuckles over the wooden bar a few times and smoothed my tie.